The South Atlantic: present and past circulation G. Wefer, W. H. Berger, G. Siedler & D. J. Webb, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1996, 644 pp., ISBN 3 540 62079 6, Hardback, £64.50

This book evolved from the keynote papers presented at the South Atlantic Symposium in Bremen in 1994. The editors of this book were the organisers of that symposium. Unlike some books of this type, submission of chapters was not open to any potential author. This means that the editors were able to maintain control over the material which went into the book, and were able to ensure a good coverage of all aspects of South Atlantic circulation. The result is a book which is thorough and well balanced.

Perhaps the first point to note is the importance of the subtitle, ‘present and past circulation’. This is a book which is focused on ocean circulation, containing in-depth papers in the fields of physical oceanography, tracer oceanography and palaeoceanography. It has little coverage of traditional chemical oceanography or of biological oceanography (despite the fact that it has an ocean colour picture on the front cover!), except where both are relevant for the analysis of deep-sea cores. I think the editors were correct not to include such fields, which deserve books in their own right. The book as it is reflects the interest in the circulation shown by the good attendance at the Bremen meeting. If it had tried to cover all aspects of the South Atlantic it would have been unwieldy or superficial. The success of this book is that it is neither.

I have already found this book invaluable, both for myself and, in particular, for my PhD students. I recommend it to anyone who needs a detailed up-to-date review of what is known about the South Atlantic, and what the remaining issues of current research are. It is, of course, already out of date, as is always the case with a weighty tome which takes a couple of years to produce. Most of the chapters must have been written in early 1995. With the large number of recent World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) cruises in the South Atlantic which have been completed and analysed in the last couple of years, oceanography has already moved on. This could be witnessed at the recent WOCE South Atlantic workshop in Brest in June 1997, at which new results were discussed. Nevertheless, this book is an excellent review and a good basis for any researcher wanting to learn about the South Atlantic.

One of the most important points which I wish to make about this book is that it will not only be of interest to those studying the South Atlantic. Many of the papers deal also with the North Atlantic, and there is much discussion of North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW). The main reason that the South Atlantic is of such interest is that it exchanges the waters of the North Atlantic (NADW) with those of the Southern Ocean (Antarctic Bottom Water, AABW, and Antarctic Intermediate Water, AAIW, primarily). The book should therefore be on the bookshelf of anyone interested in the global ocean and large-scale circulation. There are good discussions of the thermohaline circulation and global water masses.

The book is nicely presented and bound. Due to a mishap with my cabin baggage it became rather wet during a recent flight after I had taken it to the WOCE Southern Ocean workshop. Its pages are now more crinkly than they should be, but it has survived admirably. It would be somewhat weighty (in both senses of the word) to read in the bath, but I can testify that it is not likely to fall apart.

The authors of each chapter provided camera-ready form, so there is some variability in the quality of diagrams. There is some inconsistency between chapters in referencing papers which were in press in some chapters but published with full references in others, obviously because some authors prepared their camera-ready text sooner than others. The chapters are intended for researchers in their own field; they are not watered down for general consumption. This is not a textbook, and background knowledge is assumed. As a physical oceanographer I found the first half of the book fascinating and I have learnt a huge amount. It will be the first book that I give to research students wishing to learn about the Southern Ocean water masses. As a source of information it is particularly convenient to have a collection of papers together in one volume instead of searching databases and journal issues for relevant articles. One addition I would have found extremely useful would be an index, because there were so many nuggets one came across unexpectedly. However, it would have been a massive task for the editors to compile.

This book is particularly timely in view of the spinning up of the international CLIVAR programme. It should be essential reading for all those concerned about climate, especially those who think that the ocean's role is peripheral and can be represented simplistically by a swamp in an atmospheric model. There is ample evidence here for the complexity of the ocean-atmosphere system and for the need for further research. There is a central theme which comes across in the vast majority of papers; I believe that this reflects not some personal bias of the editors but a converging of opinion amongst ocean and climate scientists. This theme is the issue of the relative strengths of the possible pathways for water to return into the North Atlantic, balancing the outward flow of NADW. It is recognized that there are two pathways, the ‘cold-water path’ through the Drake Passage and the ‘warm-water path’ facilitated by the eddies which flow from the Indian to the Atlantic oceans south of South Africa. The debate concerns not the undoubted existence of these pathways but the relative importance of each in the large-scale thermohaline circulation, and thus in the transport of heat by the ocean. This must be an important aspect of the CLIVAR programme.

The first half of the book is devoted to present-day circulation of the South Atlantic, and the second half to palaeoceanographic circulation, primarily during the Last Glacial Maximum. It is peculiar that there is a tendency for the oceanographic papers to deal with the southern and western parts of the basin, while the majority of the palaeoceanographic papers concentrate on the equatorial and eastern side of the basin. As an ignorant physical oceanographer I hazard a guess that this is because the palaeoceanographers focus on upwelling regions and areas of slower ocean currents where there is deposition of sediments, whereas the physical oceanographers are excited by the areas of strong currents and eddy activity.

The book begins with an overview by Berger and Wefer, which presents a good concise summary of the major issues, awa picture of the surface currents, and introduces the delightful phrase ‘North Atlantic heat piracy’, which I had not met before. The papers by Reid and by Gordon are essential reading, and together give a detailed and thoughtful review of what we know and what we do not. Both of these papers are concerned with global circulation and the role of the South Atlantic in climate, so are full of insights into North Atlantic and Southern Ocean processes as well. Fu's paper on the results of altimetry is a good advertisement for altimetry (although it only shows TOPEX/POSEIDON data, which is a pity, since the inclusion of ERS-1 and ERS-2 data would have made a more powerful paper) but is really a summary of results published elsewhere. It is in fact the only paper which uses remotely sensed data, which is somewhat surprising. There is a nice collection of excellent papers concerned with the zonal sections undertaken during WOCE, presenting hydrographic and tracer data and discussing meridional heat transport. Lutjeharms has contributed a very thorough review of Agulhas rings and their impact. Such papers are valuable not only for the science they explain but also for their comprehensive reference lists. I found Talley's paper on AAIW a superb review and it will be well read. The book includes a good group of papers on tracer oceanography, focusing mainly on the application of recently collected chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) data sets from the WOCE sections.

On the physical oceanography side, there are a few areas for which the book coverage is disappointing. There are no papers on air-sea fluxes or forcing. This is a pity because onecirculation,wate suspects that the new ERS-1 and ERS-2 scatterometer data must be telling us a great deal about the wind field over the South Atlantic and its variability. Certainly, much effort has been expended during WOCE in attempting to produce new climatologies, and it would have been nice to have seen the major achievements and remaining problems in this area. The modelling paper by Barnier and co-workers highlights the lack of good air-sea fluxes as the major stumbling block for modelling the South Atlantic. I was also surprised that there were so few modelling papers. Barnier's paper is a good overview of the various global- and basin-scale approaches, but I would have been interested to see some detailed analyses of some of the local- and global-model output.

The second half of the book is devoted to palaeoceanography. Here again the issue of the cold-water path and the warm-water path is a recurring theme. The focus is on the later Quaternary, and results from numerous cores are discussed, including stable isotopes of oxygen and carbon. I must be honest and say that, as a physical oceanographer, I found this half of the book hard going. As with the first half of the book, these are detailed reviews and scientific discussions which assume that one is knowledgeable in their field. As someone who doesn't know when the Last Glacial Maximum was, it was somewhat mystifying, but clearly it is good for my soul to learn about these issues, especially as CLIVAR will bring the palaeoceanographer and hydrographer into closer contact (and a good thing too, many would say). I certainly found it interesting to note that the same issues kept cropping up. I always ask of palaeoceanographers, if we have such difficulty in understanding present-day circulation with all the observations we now have, how can you expect to understand past circulation with only a few cores? This book went some way towards answering that question.

This is largely a descriptive oceanographic book; there are few equations and high-powered mathematics. I recommend it for chemists, biologists or geologists who need to obtain a thorough grounding in the physical processes. Climate and atmospheric scientists will find it a valuable resource. Funding managers can find in this book the issues which are of real importance to us all. Ocean modellers will find in here the critical results which their models must reproduce. In summary, I highly recommend this book. It will be valuable to any oceanographer or palaeoceanographer interested in large-scale circulation, water masses and tracers. Suggest it to your undergraduates as a literature source for essays, and make sure your library has a copy. Lend it to your PhD students, but make sure they give it back.